How IKEA drives stakeholder conversations with the Prezly PR software

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As the world's largest furniture retailer, IKEA has a lot to communicate to a wide range of stakeholders. New collections, business results, corporate social responsibility, the list goes on.

Annelies, PR Manager at IKEA Belgium, strives to publish accessible and informative content. She wants to share great stories and keep people talking about IKEA.

IKEA's previous communication platform made it difficult for Annelies to achieve these aims. Here Annelies explains the challenges the Belgian IKEA PR team faced, and how Prezly has helped her overcome them.

A splintered workflow made distribution and access difficult

IKEA wants a real dialogue with stakeholders. Key to this is transparency about its social policies and inner workings. A number of issues, however, had impeded that goal.

Cluttered story distribution

IKEA works with two PR agencies. Each had their own distribution platforms for sharing brand stories. IKEA also had its own online newsroom on its website. That's three different platforms, each publishing different stories.

Naturally, this made it difficult for the IKEA PR team to have oversight of what information was being distributed where and to whom.

It also made stories less accessible. And IKEA doesn't believe brand stories should be segmented by its varied stakeholders' presumed interests.

Some stories garner interest from both lifestyle and corporate press. It doesn't make sense to divide content into strict, separate boxes.

Sharing visuals was a drag

Many of IKEA's stories are about lifestyle news, and these are obviously enhanced by visuals. But Annelies didn't want to limit opportunities for visual communication. She also wanted to spice up corporate news with insightful videos and images.

Existing systems made it hard to share visuals. Stakeholders frequently needed passwords to access the media assets included in a story. The team had to invest a lot of time responding to access requests from journalists.

It was hard for stakeholders to access the information they wanted.

If they wanted to circumvent the need for passwords and logins, she had to attach files to emails, overloading inboxes. Not exactly an improvement.

Publishing stories on social media was tough

Annelies recognizes that brands no longer restrict their communication efforts to just the press. Communication is everywhere. To Annelies, that's one of PR's biggest challenges.

Today, a news article can be read more via social media than any other channel.

Previously, IKEA couldn’t consistently share stories across multiple channels. Password protected content and the use of multiple platforms made it too difficult.

The new, integrated workflow makes the creation and distribution process easy as pie

By moving their press communication efforts to Prezly, IKEA left its PR troubles behind. The IKEA PR team now has a clear overview of what stories are being published. Tehy can easily combine and share visual assets, and they can more accurately evaluate the impact of PR efforts.

Stories are integrated into a single platform

All of IKEA's stories are now published on a Prezly online newsroom, giving the brand a clear, global overview of what’s happening. The two PR agencies that IKEA works with now share this same platform. It’s straightforward for Annelies to collaborate with them and her IKEA colleagues.

The move to working with Prezly has benefited stakeholders, too. It’s now super simple for IKEA’s audience to access news via this single platform.

Combining visuals and other information

With Prezly, sharing images and video is easier than ever. IKEA can combine lots of content into one simple package. Stakeholders are able to cherry-pick the most relevant and interesting information. No more hassle with passwords and delayed access to media assets.

With Prezly, we can make journalists' jobs easier. They can easily find what they're looking for in one simple package.

Stakeholder communication is so much better. Emails are no longer bloated with large attachments. Instead, emails sent via the Prezly platform transform an ordinary press release into an attractive and immediate visual overview.

What Prezly offers over traditional email is the fact that you can easily combine information so that you don’t have to overload your email with PDFs and heavy attachments.

Performance stats are centralized

With three different distribution platforms, it was hard to evaluate the success of IKEA’s PR campaigns. With Prezly, the relevant stats are in one place, making it easy for the IKEA PR team to gauge a story’s impact. When a story doesn't make the press, for example, Annelies reviews the stats to see how the story performed with stakeholders. Prezly’s data shows her open and click rates on emails, from which she can identify where the story worked well or fell off people's radar.

The email campaign reports give us an idea of what topics we should treat differently in order to get people engaged.

Social sharing is easy

Now that all of IKEA’s assets are in online brand stories, sharing on social media is easy.

With the click of a button, Annelies publishes IKEA’s stories to multiple social networks. People can access content from anywhere, from any device.

Sharing stories to social media is easy with Prezly

What did we learn?

IKEA Belgium's PR team had straightforward goals. They wanted to publish exciting, visual stories for IKEA’s stakeholders that were also easy to access. They wanted a more effective way to evaluate feedback and performance. To achieve these goals, they needed an uncluttered and better integrated communication platform. They found it in Prezly.